Tag Archives: Democracy in America

Deja Vu All Over Again?

I’ve been spending a lot of time this spring with Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America.

Title Page of the first American edition of Tocqueville’s classic, published in 1838.

Tocqueville wrote this classic at a time when democracy was still a novel experiment in the world. Its future was uncertain. Its impact was unclear. And although he was writing about democracy in a very specific historical context (he arrived in the United States at the midpoint of Andrew Jackson’s first term as president), his investigation was driven by questions as relevant today as they were in the 1830s.

I thought I’d share just a few quotes that are going into my commonplace book. Democracy in America is so rich that I could share quotes from it for months and still not get to all the good ones, but here are a few of my favorites. They come from the 2004 edition translated by Arthur Goldhammer of the University of Virginia.

* “Generally speaking, only simple conceptions can grip the mind of a nation. An idea that is clear and precise even though false will always have greater power in the world than an idea that is true but complex.”

* “Man firmly believes a thing because he accepts it without looking deeply into it. He begins to doubt when objections are raised. In many cases he succeeds in laying all his doubts to rest and begins to believe again. Then he no longer clings to a truth plucked at random from the darkness but stares truth in the face and marches directly toward its light. . . . We can be sure that the majority of men will remain in one of these two states: they will either believe without knowing why, or not know precisely what they ought to believe.”

* “But nothing is harder than the apprenticeship of liberty. This is not true of despotism. Despotism often presents itself as the remedy for all ills suffered in the past. It is the upholder of justice, the champion of the oppressed, and the founder of order. Nations are lulled to sleep by the temporary prosperity to which it gives rise, and when they are awake, they are miserable.”

* “Americans do not converse; they argue.”

* “In America centralization is not popular, and there is no cleverer way to court the majority than to rail against the alleged encroachments of the central government.”

* “Now, what has to be said in order to please the voters is not always what would best serve the political opinion they profess.”

* “It is astonishing to see how few, how weak, and how unworthy are the hands into which a great people can fall.”

And My All-Time Favorite . . .

* “When the past is no longer capable of shedding light on the future, the mind can only proceed in darkness.”

I’ve noted previously that I spent much of the past summer with Alexis de Tocqueville. Tocqueville wrote about so many facets of American politics and culture that hardly a week has gone by this autumn without something in the news bring one or more passages to mind.

This was the case last week when reports began to come in of an off-the-record summit meeting at Trump Tower in New York between the president-elect and a host of media executives and news anchors. Reports of the gathering diverge widely. Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway described the meeting as “very cordial, very productive, very congenial,” but an unnamed source likened it to a “firing squad” in which Mr. Trump attacked his guests mercilessly, and Breitbart News exulted “Trump Eats Press.”

However things went down, there is no doubt that Mr. Trump’s relationship with the press has been more openly hostile than for any major presidential candidate in U. S. history. He will assume the presidency having pledged to change federal libel laws (something he evidently believes the president can do unilaterally) so that when the “dishonest media” write “negative and horrible and false articles . . . we can sue them and win lots of money.”

All of which brought to mind Tocqueville’s reflections on the value of a free press in his classic Democracy in America. The Frenchman was no great fan of American journalists. “In America,” Tocqueville wrote in 1835,

The spirit of the journalist is to appeal crudely, directly, and artlessly to the passions of the people he is addressing, forsaking principles in order to portray individuals, pursue them into their private lives, and lay bare their weaknesses and vices. Such abuse of thought can only be deplored.

Sounds a lot like Breitbart News.

And yet, if Tocqueville could not bring himself to admire journalists, he valued journalism, believing that a free press was absolutely integral to the preservation of liberty. In vol I, part II, chapter III of Democracy in America, Tocqueville argued that it was impossible to curb the excesses of the media without creating a threat to freedom. “When it comes to the press,” he concluded, “there really is no middle ground between servitude [a press that is wholly subservient to the state] and license [a press that is wholly unrestricted]. In order to reap the priceless goods that derive from the freedom of the press,” he went on, “one must learn to accept the inevitable evils that it breeds.”

Acknowledging that the “destructive tastes” that journalists often indulged and promoted, Tocqueville’s final defense of a free press as unqualified:

The more I consider the chief effects of the independence of the press, the more convinced I am that, among the moderns, independence of the press is the most important, indeed the essential, ingredient of liberty. A people that wants to remain free therefore has the right to insist that the independence of the press is the most important, indeed the essential, ingredient of liberty.

Count me among those who are still reeling from the outcome of Tuesday’s election. Eventually, I want to write about what it all means, but I’ve got to do a lot of thinking. Our social-media-driven age demands instant analyses—the simpler and shallower the better—and as Baylor University’s Alan Jacobs has observed, almost the only response that’s unacceptable is the plea for more time to think and ponder and reflect before pronouncing. I don’t care.

For now, all I can do is share what I read in my notes this morning from the writings of Alexis de Tocqueville. If you’ve been reading this blog for a while, you know that I spent much of the past summer with that nineteenth-century Frenchman. I read three biographies about him, devoured his letters from America, and lingered for weeks over his two-volume classic Democracy in America, surely the most trenchant conservative assessment of American politics ever penned.

Alexis de Tocqueville, circa 1850

As a historian, I believe there are many good reasons to pay attention to the past, but one of the most important of those is the possibility of entering into a life-changing conversation about perennial human questions—“a conversation with the dead about what we should value and how we should live.” Alexis de Tocqueville needs to be one of our conversation partners. He has much to say to us, if we are willing to listen. And we do stand in need of a distinctively conservative critique, given that neither major party in America today is either able or inclined to offer one.

So what would Tocqueville think about the outcome of Tuesday’s election? I’d be blowing smoke to say that I know for sure. But below are some observations that Tocqueville shared after his visit to the United States in 1830-1831. I find them eerily prescient. You can read them and decide for yourself.

“Generally speaking, only simple conceptions can grip the mind of a nation. An idea that is clear and precise even though false will always have greater power in the world than an idea that is true but complex.”

“What democracy lacks . . . is not always the capacity to choose men of merit but the desire and taste to do so. . . . I am satisfied that anyone who looks upon universal suffrage as a guarantee of good choices is operating under a total illusion. Universal suffrage has other advantages, but not that one.”

“Our contemporaries are constantly wracked by two warring passions: they feel the need to be led and the desire to remain free. Unable to destroy either of these contrary instincts, they seek to satisfy both at once. They imagine a single, omnipotent, tutelary power, but one that is elected by the citizens. . . . They console themselves for being treated as wards by imagining that they have chosen their own protectors.”

“For my part, I own that I have no confidence in the spirit of liberty which seems to animate my contemporaries. I see plainly that the nations of this age are turbulent, but it is not clear to me that they are freedom loving.”

Apart from its implications for the nation and the world, last night’s second presidential debate was very humbling for me personally.

First, I learned that Donald J. Trump’s followers on Facebook and Twitter exceed the number of subscribers to my blog by a factor of fifty thousand. (Notice that I said “factor.” Mr. Trump doesn’t have fifty thousand more followers than I do. He has fifty thousand times as many.) Second, and this wounds me as well, it became abundantly clear that, despite my extensive reflections on the topic, Hillary Clinton still thinks someone somewhere once sagely observed that America is great because America is good. That sound you heard last night was me banging my head against the wall. Not once, but twice last night Secretary Clinton repeated the vacuous comment long falsely attributed to Alexis de Tocqueville.

Alexis de Tocqueville, circa 1850

As I concluded in an earlier post,”America is great because she is good” is, at best, a meaningless platitude. At worst, it muddles our thinking about democracy and makes self-righteousness sound profound. I have explained my case at length (here, here, here, here, and here), and if you happen to have connections to Ms. Clinton’s inner circle, feel free to forward the links to her and her speechwriters. In the meantime, here is my executive summary–the five reasons why we should place an immediate moratorium on the phrase “America is great because she is good”:

(1) Let’s start with the simplest—Alexis de Tocqueville never wrote these words. That doesn’t make the statement itself false, but it does make the quotation spurious. That won’t stop speechwriters from using it, but the rest of us can at least cry out “Check your sources!” the next time we hear it a political rally.

(2) “America is great because she is good” isn’t only misattributed; it’s also misquoted. The problem isn’t just that somewhere along the line we mistakenly put someone else’s words into Tocqueville’s mouth. We’ve also garbled the lines that we’ve incorrectly ascribed to him. It seems likely that the quote originated with two English Congregational ministers who visited the U.S. three years after Tocqueville did and also published their impressions. But the reverends Andrew Reed and James Matheson predicted that “America will be great if America is good,” an assertion that’s much less congratulatory than the one we’ve grown fond of.

I can imagine what some of you are thinking about now: “Relax already! Stop making mountains out of molehills! So no one wrote the exact words that we remember. Big deal. If the gist is correct—if the underlying observation is true—isn’t that what really matters?”

Perhaps. But what exactly does the statement “America is great because she is good” mean? Eric Metaxas, who knows that the quote can’t be found in Democracy in America but still pronounces it “a brilliant summation” of Tocqueville’s analysis, equates it with the belief that “it was the ‘goodness’ of America’s people that made America work.” But Tocqueville didn’t argue that at all and, with apologies to Metaxas, it is hard to see how anyone who has read Democracy in America carefully and in its entirety could think that he did. Tocqueville certainly concluded that popular beliefs contributed significantly to the survival of American liberty, but he explicitly denied that Americans were any more virtuous than the masses in France, where liberty was languishing. He even went so far as to doubt that virtue would ever be common in a democratic society—“self-interest properly understood,” hopefully, but not virtue. So we’re back to square one: what does it mean to insist that “America is great because she is good”? This bring me to reason #3:

(3) Taken at face value, the assertion is so vague as to be meaningless. It contains two critical terms that cry out for definition. What does it mean to say that “America is great?” Do we mean that America is powerful? Does it have something to do with the unemployment rate or the material standard of living, the nature of our trade agreements or the quality of our airports? Does it have anything to do with justice, mercy, dignity, or respect? Is it dependent in any way on the extent of equality or of freedom?

In like manner, what in the world do we mean when we say that “America is good”? When the rich young ruler addressed Jesus as “good teacher,” Christ corrected him: “No one is good—except God alone” (Mark 10:18). What exactly are we claiming when we insist that America is “good”? Obviously, the standard of measurement is not what Jesus had in mind, but what is the standard of measurement, and who gets to decide?

These are questions that every free society should grapple with regularly—in our homes, in our schools, in our churches, and yes, in our endless presidential campaigns. The claim that “America is great because she is good” could be a useful starting point for that national conversation, but only if we wrestle with it and push back against it. As it commonly functions, however, “America is great because she is good” doesn’t inspire deeper thought or provoke productive conversation. It becomes a substitute for thought that ends conversation. We hear it, cheer, and move on.

That’s the best-case scenario. What is far scarier is the possibility that we might take the adage seriously and come to believe it.

(4) From the perspective of orthodox Christianity, “America is great because she is good” badly muddles our thinking about democracy. For all their emphasis on the importance of virtue to the survival of the republic, the Framers of the Constitution proceeded from a skeptical view of human nature in erecting the framework of government for the new nation. “What is government itself but the greatest of all commentaries on human nature?” James Madison famously asked in Federalist #51. “If men were angels, no government would be necessary.” Although the Framers hoped that virtuous leaders would often hold office, they by no means took that for granted. On the contrary, they assumed that humans were predominantly self-interested (as did Tocqueville). This meant that unlimited power was always a threat to liberty—whether it was wielded by a king, by elected representatives, or by the people directly—and they instituted a series of checks and balances into the constitutional system to curb that possibility.

The Framers’ skeptical view of human nature was a casualty of the democratic revolution that unfolded during the first half-century of American independence. The democratic ethos that dominated the American mentality by the 1830s took for granted the unassailable moral authority of the majority. The conviction that majority rule invariably promotes moral outcomes is nonsensical unless it rests on a positive view of human nature, an unstated assumption that men and women are, at bottom, basically good.

I fear that “America is great because she is good” reinforces this view, a view that flies in the face of orthodox Christian teaching and undermines the very foundation of the gospel and the glory of the Cross. As Christians, we are free to give our qualified support to democracy, but we must do so for the right reasons. In his little-remembered essay “Membership,” C. S. Lewis reminds us that the best argument for democracy is not human goodness, but human fallenness. “There are two opposite reasons” for endorsing democracy, Lewis wrote:

You may think all men so good that they deserve a share in the government of the commonwealth, and so wise that the commonwealth needs their advice. That is, in my opinion, the false, romantic doctrine of democracy. On the other hand, you may believe fallen men to be so wicked that not one of them can be trusted with any irresponsible power over his fellows. That I believe to be the true ground of democracy.

“America is great because she is good” perpetuates a false doctrine of democracy.

(5) It follows that “America is great because she is good” promotes self-congratulation rather than gratitude. As more than one commentator on this blog has observed, a close reading of Tocqueville’s analysis points more to divine grace than human virtue. In explaining the flourishing of American liberty in the 1830s, Tocqueville credited “a thousand circumstances independent of man’s will,” laws and legal practices inherited from earlier generations, and a range of moral and intellectual habits, including a hefty dose of self-interest. In place of such complexity, the quote that we so love substitutes a simplistic formula with little room for God’s unmerited favor. A works-based righteousness is lurking here. For the Christian, “Lord, I thank you that I am not as other men are” is as unbecoming in politics as in any other arena of discipleship.

For the past three weeks I’ve been writing about the best remembered lines from Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, and I’d like to wrap up the series with a recommendation: I propose an immediate moratorium on the aphorism “America is great because she is good.” Let’s banish it to the place where tired clichés go to die. At best it’s a meaningless platitude; at worst, it muddles our thinking about democracy and makes self-righteousness sound profound. We’re better off without it, and here are five reasons why:

(1) Let’s start with the simplest—Alexis de Tocqueville never wrote these words. (You know this by now if you’ve been following along.) That doesn’t make the statement itself false, but it does make the quotation spurious. That won’t stop speechwriters from using it, but the rest of us can at least cry out “Check your sources!” the next time we hear it a political rally.

(2) “America is great because she is good” isn’t only misattributed; it’s also misquoted. The problem isn’t just that somewhere along the line we mistakenly put someone else’s words into Tocqueville’s mouth. We’ve also garbled the lines that we’ve incorrectly ascribed to him. It seems likely that the quote originated with two English Congregational ministers who visited the U.S. three years after Tocqueville did and also published their impressions. But the reverends Andrew Reed and James Matheson predicted that “America will be great if America is good,” an assertion that’s much less congratulatory than the one we’ve grown fond of.

I can imagine what some of you are thinking about now: “Relax already! Stop making mountains out of molehills! So no one wrote the exact words that we remember. Big deal. If the gist is correct—if the underlying observation is true—isn’t that what really matters?”

Perhaps. But what exactly does the statement “America is great because she is good” mean? Eric Metaxas, who knows that the quote can’t be found in Democracy in America but still pronounces it “a brilliant summation” of Tocqueville’s analysis, equates it with the belief that “it was the ‘goodness’ of America’s people that made America work.” But Tocqueville didn’t argue that at all and, with apologies to Metaxas, it is hard to see how anyone who has read Democracy in America carefully and in its entirety could think that he did. Tocqueville certainly concluded that popular beliefs contributed significantly to the survival of American liberty, but he explicitly denied that Americans were any more virtuous than the masses in France, where liberty was languishing. He even went so far as to doubt that virtue would ever be common in a democratic society—“self-interest properly understood,” hopefully, but not virtue. So we’re back to square one: what does it mean to insist that “America is great because she is good”? This bring me to reason #3:

(3) Taken at face value, the assertion is so vague as to be meaningless. It contains two critical terms that cry out for definition. What does it mean to say that “America is great?” Do we mean that America is powerful? Does it have something to do with the unemployment rate or the material standard of living, the nature of our trade agreements or the quality of our airports? Does it have anything to do with justice, mercy, dignity, or respect? Is it dependent in any way on the extent of equality or of freedom?

In like manner, what in the world do we mean when we say that “America is good”? When the rich young ruler addressed Jesus as “good teacher,” Christ corrected him: “No one is good—except God alone” (Mark 10:18). What exactly are we claiming when we insist that America is “good”? Obviously, the standard of measurement is not what Jesus had in mind, but what is the standard of measurement, and who gets to decide?

These are questions that every free society should grapple with regularly—in our homes, in our schools, in our churches, and yes, in our endless presidential campaigns. The claim that “America is great because she is good” could be a useful starting point for that national conversation, but only if we wrestle with it and push back against it. As it commonly functions, however, “America is great because she is good” doesn’t inspire deeper thought or provoke productive conversation. It becomes a substitute for thought that ends conversation. We hear it, cheer, and move on.

That’s the best-case scenario. What is far scarier is the possibility that we might take the adage seriously and come to believe it.

(4) From the perspective of orthodox Christianity, “America is great because she is good” badly muddles our thinking about democracy. For all their emphasis on the importance of virtue to the survival of the republic, the Framers of the Constitution proceeded from a skeptical view of human nature in erecting the framework of government for the new nation. “What is government itself but the greatest of all commentaries on human nature?” James Madison famously asked in Federalist #51. “If men were angels, no government would be necessary.” Although the Framers hoped that virtuous leaders would often hold office, they by no means took that for granted. On the contrary, they assumed that humans were predominantly self-interested (as did Tocqueville). This meant that unlimited power was always a threat to liberty—whether it was wielded by a king, by elected representatives, or by the people directly—and they instituted a series of checks and balances into the constitutional system to curb that possibility.

The Framers’ skeptical view of human nature was a casualty of the democratic revolution that unfolded during the first half-century of American independence. The democratic ethos that dominated the American mentality by the 1830s took for granted the unassailable moral authority of the majority. The conviction that majority rule invariably promotes moral outcomes is nonsensical unless it rests on a positive view of human nature, an unstated assumption that men and women are, at bottom, basically good.

I fear that “America is great because she is good” reinforces this view, a view that flies in the face of orthodox Christian teaching and undermines the very foundation of the gospel and the glory of the Cross. As Christians, we are free to give our qualified support to democracy, but we must do so for the right reasons. In his little-remembered essay “Membership,” C. S. Lewis reminds us that the best argument for democracy is not human goodness, but human fallenness. “There are two opposite reasons” for endorsing democracy, Lewis wrote:

You may think all men so good that they deserve a share in the government of the commonwealth, and so wise that the commonwealth needs their advice. That is, in my opinion, the false, romantic doctrine of democracy. On the other hand, you may believe fallen men to be so wicked that not one of them can be trusted with any irresponsible power over his fellows. That I believe to be the true ground of democracy.

“America is great because she is good” perpetuates a false doctrine of democracy.

(5) It follows that “America is great because she is good” promotes self-congratulation rather than gratitude. As more than one commentator on this blog has observed, a close reading of Tocqueville’s analysis points more to divine grace than human virtue. In explaining the flourishing of American liberty in the 1830s, Tocqueville credited “a thousand circumstances independent of man’s will,” laws and legal practices inherited from earlier generations, and a range of moral and intellectual habits, including a hefty dose of self-interest. In place of such complexity, the quote that we so love substitutes a simplistic formula with little room for God’s unmerited favor. A works-based righteousness is lurking here. For the Christian, “Lord, I thank you that I am not as other men are” is as unbecoming in politics as in any other arena of discipleship.

So what did Alexis de Tocqueville really think of American Christianity, and why should American Christians care?

For the past couple of weeks, I have been writing about a reassuring adage popularly attributed to Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, namely that “America is great because she is good.” This line has long been favored by politicians and pundits, and just this summer it’s cropped up in places as disparate as Hillary Clinton’s acceptance speech to the Democratic National Convention and a policy statement by the Harvard Republican Club.

Alexis de Tocqueville, circa 1850

If you’ve been following the series, you know by now that Tocqueville never penned these exact lines—they’re almost certainly plagiarized (though inaccurately) from the writings of two British Congregational ministers who visited the United States shortly after Tocqueville did. More importantly, Tocqueville didn’t argue anything as simplistic as the bumper-sticker slogan we’re fond of attributing to him. Tocqueville didn’t write as a partisan. He wanted his analysis of what was then the most democratic nation on earth to be useful to a world moving fitfully in the direction of ever greater democracy, but he bristled at the prospect of his painstaking analysis being hijacked in the service of a particular political or religious faction. This is why one of the most prominent features of Democracy in America is its complexity. There’s a good reason why it’s more than eight hundred pages long.

Tocqueville visited seventeen states and conducted more than two hundred interviews during his nine-month tour of the United States, and then he meditated and reflected on what he had seen and heard for the better part of another decade as he sought to make sense of it all. He concluded that there were numerous factors that helped to explain the flourishing of liberty in the United States. Least important, though still hugely significant, were “a thousand circumstances independent of man’s will that ease the way for the democratic republic in the United States.” Even more important were laws and political practices inherited from an earlier time, some brought to American shores by 17th-century Puritans, others codified by the Revolutionary generation in the structure of American federalism and the specific features of the U. S. Constitution. More important still were what Tocqueville labeled “mores,” by which he meant “the whole range of intellectual and moral dispositions that men bring to the state of society.” In sketching the latter, Tocqueville described Americans as acquisitive and materialistic, independent-minded, individualistic, rationally self-interested, and religious.

Clearly, this does not boil down to a conclusion that “it was the ‘goodness’ of America’s people that made America work,” as Eric Metaxas curiously insists in his recent summary of Democracy in America. But rather than leave it at that, we need to dig deeper into what Tocqueville actually believed about American Christianity. It’s in Tocqueville’s description of the role of religious belief in Jacksonian America that the casual reader will most likely be led astray. Why is this?

The main reason is that, when it comes to the Frenchman’s views on American Christianity, there are really two Tocquevilles. There’s the Tocqueville who underscores the importance of Christianity to American democracy, and the Tocqueville who raises questions about the influence of democracy on American Christianity. This is a historical problem, obviously, in that it makes it harder for us to figure out what Tocqueville is actually saying. But there’s a sense in which it’s also a moral problem. All things equal, we—and here I mean Christian readers—will like the first Tocqueville better. The first Tocqueville pats us on the back, tells us that democracy can’t survive without us, and hands us any number of effective quotes to hit our unbelieving neighbors over the head with. The second Tocqueville is a less pleasant conversation partner. He’s less impressed with American Christianity and seems to suggest that there was a fair amount of conforming to the world among Jacksonian-era believers.

Put simply, the first Tocqueville congratulates us, the second wants to convict us. Because of this, Democracy in America lays bare one of the great temptations that we face when we study history: the temptation to usethe past as ammunitionrather than learn from it and be changed by it. Consciously or unconsciously, we’ll be inclined to highlight the passages that reinforce what we already believe (or want to believe) and tune out the inconvenient parts that don’t advance our agendas. With regard to Democracy in America, if we’re not careful we’ll be all ears for the Tocqueville we wantto hear and deaf to the Tocqueville we may needto hear.

Title Page of the first American edition of Tocqueville’s classic, published in 1838.

Let’s start with the first Tocqueville, the one who many American Christians will be glad to listen to. Without doubt, Democracy in America offers one of the most eloquent arguments for the importance of religious belief to political liberty ever penned. The “spirit of freedom” and the “spirit of faith” were intimately intertwined in America, Tocqueville maintained, and it was no coincidence that the United States was simultaneously “the most enlightened and the freest” of nations and “the place where the Christian religion has kept the greatest real power over men’s souls.” There was a general principle at work: democracies need religion if they are to survive and flourish.

Let’s review his reasoning: One of Tocqueville’s greatest concerns was what he called the “tyranny of the majority.” “The people rule in the American political realm as God rules the universe,” Tocqueville found, and with this unchallenged popular power came the potential to abuse the politically vulnerable. When Tocqueville spoke of tyranny, he meant not simply absolute power—which he often referred to as despotism—but rather the exercise of power that resulted in oppression or injustice. “In my opinion, the main evil of the present democratic institutions of the United States does not arise . . . from their weakness, but from their strength,” he reflected. “I am not so much alarmed at the excessive liberty which reigns in that country as at the inadequate securities which one finds there against tyranny.”

And yet—and this is the crucial observation that so intrigued Tocqueville—the American majority did not fully utilize its power to oppress the minority. Acknowledging the enormous exception of southern slavery, Tocqueville believed that, on the whole, in America the potential for injustice vastly exceeded its actual extent. To use Tocqueville’s terminology, in America the majority was omnipotent but not tyrannical. Why was this, Tocqueville wondered?

Here is where mores come in. Americans, Tocqueville found, had inculcated “habits of restraint” that, becoming second nature, reminded them daily in conscious and unconscious ways that not everything you have the power to do is good to do. Some of these “habits of restraint” were expressions of what Tocqueville called “the doctrine of self-interest properly understood,” which I wrote about in a previous post. Americans had learned that denying themselves short-term pleasures often maximized their long-term well-being. This helped to create “a multitude of citizens who are disciplined, temperate, moderate, prudent, and self-controlled.”

But Americans’ religious beliefs were also a crucial source of these “habits of restraint.” In the United States “Christianity reigns without obstacles,” he observed, which is why

No one in the United States has dared to profess the maxim that everything is allowed in the interests of society, an impious maxim apparently invented in an age of freedom in order to legitimate every future tyrant. Thus, while the law allows the American people to do everything, there are things which religion prevents them from imagining and forbids them to dare.

This contribution was so critical that Tocqueville concluded that, although “religion . . . never intervenes directly in the government of American society,” it nevertheless functioned as “the first of their political institutions.” If religion did not give Americans “their taste for liberty,” he concluded, “it does notably facilitate their use of that liberty.” Yes, we like this Tocqueville.

But what about the second Tocqueville, the one that’s far less reassuring? Let’s listen to him for a while. To begin, it’s important to note that Tocqueville’s focus was always on the external, political consequences of religious belief in America. He commented on American religion in much the same way that a political scientist or sociologist would. This meant, among other things, that he overtly declined to say whether he thought Americans’ religious beliefs were either true or genuine—“for who can read the bottom of men’s hearts?”—although he did hazard the conviction that “hypocrisy must be common.”

Whether Christianity was true or American Christians’ faith was authentic were both irrelevant for his purposes. “Though it matters a great deal to each individual that his religion be true,” he explained, “that is not the case for society. Society has nothing to fear from the other life, and nothing to hope for, and what matters most to it is not so much that all citizens profess the true religion as that each citizen profess some religion.”

And yet in private moments Tocqueville revealed considerable skepticism of American Christianity. In Democracy in America Tocqueville recalled that “it was the country’s religious aspect that first captured my attention.” But in his personal letters home he shared considerable misgivings about what he was observing. Less than two months into his stay, he shared his reservations in a lengthy report to an old family friend. “I even doubt that religious opinions hold as much sway as I originally thought they did.”

Americans were admittedly very strict in their observance of the Sabbath, and Tocqueville saw numerous other examples of external religious zeal, but he remained unconvinced. “Unless I’m sadly mistaken, these external forms conceal a reservoir of doubt and indifference,” he conjectured. “Faith is obviously inert,” he went on. “What was once a strong impulse is growing feebler by the day. Enter any church (I refer to the protestant kind) and you will hear sermons about morals; not one word about dogma—nothing at all likely to fluster one’s neighbor or awaken the idea of dissent.” The conclusion to the young Frenchman was clear: “On the whole, religion doesn’t move people to the depth of their soul.”

Tocqueville was more circumspect about what he shared in public, but he still peppered Democracy in America with observations that should give us pause. For example, even while emphasizing the compatibility between Christianity and political liberty, Tocqueville hinted that Americans had so conflated the two that they tended to support Christianity as an expression of patriotism.

“In the United States, religion never ceases to warm itself at patriotism’s hearth,” he observed. He spoke with numerous missionaries to the American West during his journey and found that “eternity is only one of their concerns.” Carrying Christianity to the frontier was one means of spreading American values and protecting America’s borders. “If you were to question these missionaries of Christian civilization,” he related, “you would be quite surprised to . . . find politicians where you had thought there were only men of religion.”

This emphasis on Christianity’s earthly benefits was widespread, according to Tocqueville:

American preachers refer to this world constantly and, indeed, can avert their eyes from it only with the greatest of difficulty. Seeking to touch their listeners all the more effectively, they are forever pointing out how religious beliefs foster liberty and public order, and in listening to them it is often difficult to tell whether the chief object of religion is to procure eternal happiness in the other world or well-being in this one.

George Caleb Bingham, “The Verdict of the People,” 1854-55

In Tocqueville’s view, Americans had effectively married the “doctrine of self-interest properly understood” with their commitments to Christianity. Not only did they “adhere to their religion out of self-interest,” but the self-interest they had in mind was as much about earthly benefit as heavenly reward.

It is no coincidence that Tocqueville uses his observation on American preachers referring constantly to this world as a segue into his chapter “On the Taste for Material Well-Being in America.” The central theme of that chapter is that “love of well-being has become the national and dominant taste, and a sub-theme is that Americans have combined the passion for well-being with religious sentiment, with the result that “the people want to be as well off as possible in this world without renouncing their chances in the next.”

Finally, we need to listen to Tocqueville’s observations about American Christianity in light of what he has to share about American values more broadly. Tocqueville tells us that Christianity “reigns” in America “by universal consent,” but he also tells us that Americans’ near universal motive is self-interest, that they are skeptical of any authority (even within the church) not granted by the people themselves, and that there is “no other country where the love of money occupies as great a place in the hearts of men.” What are we to make of this? I’d love to hear your thoughts.

In the end, I think we need to listen to both Tocquevilles, the one that underscores the centrality of faith to freedom and the one that reminds us that political influence doesn’t always go hand in hand with spiritual vitality.

I’ll be back in a bit with some concluding thoughts on “America is great because she is good.”

Did Alexis de Tocqueville think that “America is great because Americas is good,” as scores of politicians and pundits over the years have insisted? Did he conclude that “the secret to American freedom is American virtue,” as Eric Metaxas has recently claimed to be the Frenchmen’s “inescapable” conclusion? What did Tocqueville really believe about the American character, and why should we care if he has been misrepresented?

Alexis de Tocqueville, circa 1850

In my last post I reviewed the three main categories that Tocqueville identified to explain why liberty had endured in the United States in the presence of unprecedented equality. He began by pointing to the crucial importance of “providential” circumstances “independent of man’s will,” most notably the propitious geographic situation of the United States and its vast store of natural resources. More important still were the system of laws inherited from the Founders, especially the overarching structure of American federalism, the safeguards built into the national Constitution, and the key role played by the American judiciary at both the state and national levels. Finally, Tocqueville underscored the paramount importance of what he labeled “mores,” the habits of heart and mind that shaped the ways that Americans interacted with each other and with their government.

The first two categories had little to do with Americans’ character, and as I mentioned last time, to the degree that they helped to explain the perpetuation of liberty in the U. S., Tocqueville seems to be saying that American freedom has much more to do with divine grace than human goodness. The third category is different, however. In turning to mores—to what Americans believed and how what they believed affected how they behaved—Tocqueville is indisputably arguing that part of the reason that liberty is flourishing in America is because of American values. But what were those values?

Before answering that question, I have to stop and interject what is my single most favorite quotation from Democracy in America. It’s an observation that speaks volumes about Tocqueville’s reading of human nature and also explains why Americans have found it so hard to hear what Tocqueville had to say. Here’s the quote, which I feature on the syllabus of just about every course that I teach:

A false but clear and precise idea always has more power in the world than one which is true but complex.

Tocqueville’s sketch of the American character is nothing if not complex, and to condense it to the simplistic assertion “America is good” makes an effective political slogan but misrepresents his argument badly.

Remember that the central focus of Democracy in America is Tocqueville’s quest to understand the consequences of equality on society and politics. When it comes to the American character, he is most interested in those traits that either are shaped by American equality or shape equality’s effects on American liberty. He has much to say on the topic—almost the entirety of volume II is relevant—but here are the character traits that I would say Tocqueville finds paramount: Generalizing broadly, Americans as Tocqueville describes them are materialistic and acquisitive, independent-minded, individualistic (up to a point), rationally self-interested, and religious. Let’s take each in turn, and as we consider each, ask yourself how each might be viewed in the light of orthodox Christian teaching.

Within days of setting foot in America, Tocqueville had concluded that the United States was far more materialistic than any of the nations of Europe. “Here we are truly in another world,” he marveled in a letter to his brother Edouard. “Political passions are only superficial. The one passion that runs deep, the only one that stirs the human heart day in and day out, is the acquisition of wealth.” Some of his initial impressions had changed by the time he sat down to write Democracy in America, but this one only hardened. “I know no other country where love of money has such a grip on men’s hearts,” he informed his readers. A “breathless cupidity” drove Americans “to nothing but the pursuit of wealth.” Related to this was a persistent discontentment that propelled the typical American to a relentless striving for things. “Death steps in in the end and stops him before he has grown tired of this futile pursuit.”

Tocqueville also observed among Americans an “extreme love of independence.” A love of independence could be an admirable trait in Tocqueville’s mind. By his own admission, Tocqueville’s greatest “passion” was the “love of liberty,” and Americans’ love of independence could certainly foster that. But Tocqueville subscribed to the classical view that moral virtues and vices come not in pairs but in threes. Someone with too little love of independence was “servile,” with a mindset befitting a slave, but someone with an exaggerated love of independence could resent even legitimate authority. Such a person was “recalcitrant,” and recalcitrance was one of the character traits that St. Augustine positioned at the very heart of human nature after the Fall. In Tocqueville’s view, Americans’ passion for equality predisposed them to scorn any authority other than the unassailable moral authority of the majority. This caused them to be resentful of any intellectual, political, or religious authority not actually awarded by the people themselves.

Title Page of the first American edition of Tocqueville’s classic, published in 1838. The word “individualism” first appeared in the English language in this book.

Americans were also prone to individualism, according to Tocqueville. Modern-day Americans often view individualism positively, as an expression of admirable self-reliance and initiative, but Tocqueville saw it in a very different light. Aristocracy “linked all citizens together in a long chain from peasant to king,” Tocqueville explained, whereas democracy “breaks the chain and severs the links.” Equality placed citizens side by side but “without a common bond to hold them together.” Owing nothing to anyone, expecting nothing from anyone, men and women gradually withdraw from society into the cocoon of the family. In Tocqueville’s view, individualism eats away at community and undermines civic life. Happily, Americans in the 1830s largely offset this tendency with a penchant for joining forces with others to accomplish specific tasks. Americans were “constantly joining together in groups” to work toward common goals, whether it was the erection of a hospital, the improvement of a school, or the promotion of some moral or political goal.

That they could join forces with their neighbors to accomplish tasks that they couldn’t accomplish alone reflected another of the character traits Tocqueville emphasized: the degree to which Americans were motivated by the rational calculation of self-interest. The pursuit of self-interest can be impulsive, reckless, and actually detrimental to wellbeing in the long run, or it can be rational, dispassionate, and prudent in a way that brings long-term benefits. The latter is what Tocqueville meant by “self-interest, properly understood,” and he argued in vol. II of Democracy in America that it was a doctrine that prevailed almost universally among the people of the United States.

While Eric Metaxas insists that Tocqueville believed that “the secret to American freedom was American virtue,” Tocqueville begins his chapter on the “doctrine of self-interest, properly understood” with the contention that the idealization of virtue (defined as the denial of self for the good of the whole) was a hallmark of aristocratic societies, not democratic ones. In democratic ages, he contends, the ideal of self-sacrifice for the good of others gradually gives way to the belief that the denial of self in the near term can actually further self-interest in the long run. Americans no longer spoke of the beauty of virtuous sacrifice, Tocqueville found. Instead, they praised the usefulness of prudent self-denial. If they had a true guiding star among the heroes of the Revolution, it was Benjamin Franklin, whose “Poor Richard’s Almanack” had shown Americans the path to health and wealth through hard work and thrift.

Self-interest properly understood did not lead Americans to classical virtue, Tocqueville acknowledged, “but it does create a multitude of citizens who are disciplined, temperate, moderate, prudent, and self-controlled.” In many ways such character traits were a blessing to the larger society, but they originated in self-interest, not in virtuous self-denial as a noble act in and of itself. Americans were no less selfish than the French, Tocqueville reckoned, but American selfishness was “enlightened” in a way that French selfishness was not. “Instead of blindly yielding to his first desires,” the typical American “has learned the art of combating them and has become accustomed to easily sacrificing the pleasure of the moment to the permanent interests of his entire life.”

Finally, Tocqueville described Americans as surprisingly religious. “When I arrived in the United States, it was the country’s religious aspect that first captured my attention,” he informed his readers. To his surprise, the country that was “the freest and most enlightened” in the world, was also the country where religion’s “influence is greatest.” What Tocqueville had to say about religion in America is so important, and at the same time so complicated, that it will take an entire post to distill his observations.

I’ll turn to that in my next post and (finally) wrap up this series on the oft-repeated claim “America is great because America is good.” In the meantime, I would love to hear your thoughts. In characterizing Americans as acquisitive and materialistic, independent-minded and individualistic, rationally self-interested and religious, was Alexis de Tocqueville making the case in the 1830s that “America is good”?